We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Data is accumulating that the British residential property market is now undergoing a significant fall. The commercial side of it has been suffering for some time. Apart from some prime residential bits in central London – and even these parts are not immune to change – average prices have now fallen month on month across the country for quite some time.
Some of this may abate eventually. I hope so, since a collapse in house prices would presage a major recession. It is all well and good for people to say that a shakeout is necessary to clear all this cheap money out of the system – and I understand that point – but it is pretty grim having to endure the process first-hand. But beyond that, what this episode reminds me of is the unwise move by many people to put all their long-term retirement savings options into property. I know quite a few people who cheerfully tell me that they have no pension and are relying on a business or set of properties to do the job. Well, they have a half-decent point: many pension savings schemes are a rip-off and poorly invested. But relying on bricks and mortar to keep us comfortable in our rocking chairs does not strike me as very smart. Maybe market developments will act as a wakeup call. And anyway, as I have remarked before, more and more people are going to have to re-think the whole notion of “retirement” anyway, particularly if we are going to live longer, and in healthier shape, than our ancestors.
You may not know that a Home Office minister is touring the UK holding ‘consultation’ meetings about the National Identity Scheme, and that it is more nonsensical than even the average government consultation exercise. She is, however, and nothing will be allowed to stand in her way. 3 members of NO2ID were arrested this morning for “suspected breach of the peace” while protesting outside the venue of the Edinburgh consultation exercise. Making ministers look bad will these days get you hustled away by police, apparently.
The reason the ‘consultation’ is even more fatuous than usual is this. There is no question the intention is to go ahead: the legislation was passed two years ago. And any questioning of the plan is ruled out of order – if not, indeed, arrestable. The object of this tour is to gather together “stakeholders” – businesses and voluntary organisations, and to persuade them that helping the government strong-arm their customers, staff and volunteers into enrolling will ultimately be for the good of all. In fact it seeks suggestions from them how best to get universal compliance.
Rounding up any dissidents is the last resort, of course.
Update: Apparently 9 people are still in custody at time of writing (18:20 BST). Hat-tip: Glasgow Herald, who called me for a statement.
Update 2: (06:23 BST) You can read the account of Geraint Bevan, of NO2ID Scotland, here. (The hard scientists among our readers will be pleased to know that the ‘Dr’ signifies Geraint just got his PhD in engineering.)
Much has been said about David Davis’s motives for doing what he’s doing. He is vain. He is mad. He is bored. My opinion? He is a politician. Politicians are vain, often mad. Politics is mostly very boring. I say: Who cares what Davis’s reasons are for saying what he is saying, and doing what he is doing? What matters is what messages he is sending out and what impact, if any, they will have.
I applaud Davis for communicating a general unease concerning civil liberties. What Davis said in his campaign blog yesterday about the DNA database will surely please our own Guy Herbert, if it has not done so already :
…why should a million innocent people and 100,000 children be kept on the DNA database? This is the state exceeding its powers.
Indeed. However, Herbertians may also be somewhat surprised and not a little distressed by what Davis said in that same posting, immediately above that bit about the DNA database, on the subject of CCTV cameras:
… I have been explaining that I am not against CCTV – but if it is going to be used the cameras should be able to provide clear images and all of the evidence should be usable in court. Currently only 20% is usable. At the moment we just have a placebo effect for Citizen UK.
His objection to the cameras is: that they do not work well enough! We are not, in this matter as in so many others, getting as much government as we are paying for. Of the possible damage to British society that might result from it being constantly spied on by officialdom, with very good cameras, for which David Davis will surely not have to wait long, he says, at any rate in this posting, nothing.
As I say, David Davis is a politician. Be thankful for small mercies, but do not assume any large ones from this man.
The BBC reports that our mad government is about to attempt to warp time by the application of law:
The government is to bring forward new legislation to outlaw all forms of age discrimination, the BBC has learned. Equalities Minister Harriet Harman is expected to announce the plan on Thursday as part of a package of measures in an Equalities Bill.[…] Travel, health and motor insurance is also expected to be included, where cover is simply withdrawn beyond a certain age or is prohibitively expensive.
How is this going to work with mortgages, and those annuities that HMRC forces people to buy with their pension funds on retirement? Women live longer, so they get less for their money in retirement annuities, which they wouldn’t with another investment.
(Digression: Annuitants also pay more tax than they might from some other forms of investment. This is one explanation for HMRC maintaining insurance companies in this monopoly. That’s slightly more creditable than the one that senior tax officials and treasury ministers are accustomed to give more effort to understanding of the problems of the big financial institutions than those of ordinary pensioners because they have an eye to supplementing their own retirement funds by directorships and consultancies.)
It gets weirder:
Under plans to make workplaces more diverse, Ms Harman wants to allow employers to appoint people specifically because of their race or gender. The proposals would only apply when choosing between candidates equally qualified for the job. But it means, for example, women or people from minorities could be hired ahead of others in order to create a more balanced workforce. Some employers argue they already do this, while others may say these policies will need careful handling to reduce the risk of causing resentment amongst existing staff.
You don’t say. The capacity for bureaucrats lunacy, personal distress, and horrifically abstruse legal dispute where racial and sexual discrimination is both banned and permitted at the same time is going to be vast.
I predict an efflorescence of debates between ‘equalities’ officials in which several contradictory standards are created. (Should recruitment ‘represent’ the locality or the country at large? is its current makeup relevant? Or can you hire an exclusively Kazakh workforce because they are the only Kazakhs in the country?). Ethnic and other demographic categorisation of individuals will be even more ramified. And employers will be under more pressure to collect information about people’s family background and personal habits in order to ensure they are either correctly not discriminating, or discriminating correctly.
The government has faced criticism from some quarters for presiding over a society which has arguably become more unequal.
All animals are unequal, but some animals are more unequal than others. All it requires is an official licence.
There seems, finally, to be a concerted effort going on to rid Zimbabwe of its appalling President, Robert Mugabe. The disgust felt by the entire civilised world at from the farce of the recent Zimbabwean election, won in the first round by the opposition but now about to be scrubbed out by pure force, was too much even for President Mbeki of South Africa to resist. Today Nelson Mandela made a short speech giving voice, finally, to his disgust at Mugabe’s behaviour. And now that Mandela has spoken, Britain has felt able to chip in by forbidding a Zimbawe cricket visit to Britain next year, and by stripping Mugabe of a knighthood of a particularly grand and vacuous variety that was conferred upon him some years ago. As the Tesco adverts say, every little helps.
But Mugabe will never go merely because of trivial indignities such as those. He has no better nature to be appealed to, no shame. It is being said that if South Africa pulls the plug in some way on the Mugabe regime, that will finish it. I hope that some time during the next few days or weeks, we will all get the chance to see if that’s true. When the lights don’t work inside Mugabe’s palaces, when the electric fences guarding him stop hurting anyone, when his bodyguards don’t know where their next meal is to come from, then that will indeed be the end of him, and this can’t come too soon for the wretched people of the country he has ruined. It’s all very Shakespearian.
I don’t know if Mr Brown will deserve any particular credit for such an outcome, if and when it finally materialises. I recall Mr Brown lining himself up some weeks ago with all this anti-Mugabe activity, speaking out against this grotesque man at the UN or some such place. But I suspect that this was only done then so noisily and so newsworthily because this was about the only uncontroversially respectable policy that Mr Brown still had on his desk at that time, which was, you will recall, a time of impending elections. I remember at around that same time speculating that Mugabe would outlast Brown. I hope that this turns out to be wrong, or, if right, that this is because Mr Brown succumbs to mysterious medical problems brought on by Labour Party fundraising difficulties, some time during the next few days.
Here is a great new book to cheer libertarians as we draw close to the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service. Written by the director of Nurses for Reform, Dr. Helen Evans, and published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, ‘Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?’ not only shows that the country’s top 100 health opinion formers no longer actually believe in nationalised healthcare but, gloriously, this book fundamentally challenges the medical monopoly inherent in all health systems around the world.
Citing a huge array of free marketeers the work is awash with glorious quotes like this one from David Friedman:
Both barbers and physicians are licensed; both professions have for decades used licensing to keep their numbers down and their salaries up. Government regulation of barbers makes haircuts more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have fewer haircuts and longer hair. Government regulation of physicians makes medical care more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have less medical care and shorter lives. Given the choice of deregulating one profession or the other, I would choose the physicians.
Quoting our own Brian Micklethwait we again read:
Far from being obvious to me that a truly free medical market would be disastrous, I believe on the contrary that such arrangements would be of huge benefit to mankind, and that the sooner medicine is done this way the better.
Things would not, inevitably, be perfect. Some fools would make crass blunders, by ignoring manifestly superior medical services for the most frivolous of reasons, and by patronising the most notoriously incompetent. Some such fools would perish from their foolishness. Others would merely be unlucky. No law can prevent either stupidity or bad luck, although the world is now filled with the particular stupidity which consists of refusing to face this truth, and with the many luckless victims of this stupidity.
Powerfully, he concludes:
Given that for most people the avoidance of suicide rather than suicide is the objective, a truly free medical market would enable them, for the first time ever, to purchase steadily improving medical advice and medical help, and at a steadily diminishing price.
One of the most pernicious restrictions on medicine imposed by the current medical regime is the restriction on advertising. In a free market rival medical procedures, rival medical ‘philosophies’, rival views on the relative importance of confidentiality, hygiene, speed of treatment, riskiness of treatment, and so forth, would all battle it out in the market place. ‘Alternative’ therapists would be allowed to prescribe potentially dangerous drugs, as only government favoured therapists may now. It would be up to the patients to pick therapists who seemed to know what they were doing and their look out if they chose badly. The already thriving medical periodical press would assist with voluminous comparative advice, praise and criticism.
In such a free market, any number of different medical styles could be practised, and patients would make their choices.
Evans’s book is a must read for libertarians. It is also a tonic for the period of NHS propaganda we will no doubt endure over the next couple of weeks.
In view of recent legal developments this humble blogger would like to state that her comment over breakfast last Thursday consisting of the words “That Shami Chakrabarti is never off the telly” was mere banter and persiflage and in no way, shape or form meant to suggest that contact between Ms Chakrabarti’s anatomy and said machinery was of a rumptitious or tumptitious nature.
UPDATE: Oh dear, judging from the comments, that was another of my jokes that sailed straight off the edge of the world. I commented later:
“The point was, and I do apologize – though not in a way that admits liability! – if my attempt at making it in a funny way was not clear to all readers, was that while I’m all for the stand David Davis is making, Shami Chakrabarti threatening to sue someone over an ‘innuendo’ so mild that it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the mouth of Bertie Wooster, is petty and trivialises the issue.”
Blimey! This is what the deputy leader of the BNP said about the Davis by-election:
We would argue that these people [jihadist extremists] should not be in the country in the first place, but if the price we have to pay for the accommodation of millions of immigrants is the scrapping of our ancient rights, then it is not a price worth paying.
It seems they have principles deeper than the anti-immigrant feeling that people like me assume is their prime appeal. That’s a very pleasant surprise, though for this open-border freemarketeer rationalist and sexual anarchist they have a little way to go to catch my vote. HMG on the other hand makes a big fuss about its ‘anti-racist’ credentials, but is happy to appeal to xenophobia at every conceivable opportunity in order to promote the destruction of liberty for its own sake.
Neil Glass, who writes under the pen name David Craig, is to run against David Davies with these immortal words:
My message is that the 42 days issue is not important to most people as we are unlikely to be affected by it. However, living on the national average salary as I do, I believe that what is important to taxpayers is how MPs have become overpaid, out of touch and are wasting billions of pounds of our money when the cost of living is spiraling out of control.”
So other people’s liberty, meh, who cares about such trifles? All that matters to Neil Glass is having money wasted. Truly here we have an unabashedly amoral man …who will feel right at home in politics. The fact he would give half him MP pay if he won (which he won’t) to charity is a political device, nothing more. This is not a person I would care to shake hands with, to put it mildly, as by doing this he is overtly running against civil liberties.
A crackle of buzzwords in the braes. The Scottish government has “bold proposals to deal with the issue” of the “impact on crime and anti-social behaviour” of people drinking alcohol, which is reputedly “often cheaper than water” in some Scottish supermarkets. Where that leaves the stereotype of Scots as careful with money, I don’t know. Why would they buy water from supermarkets rather than getting it near-free from a tap? Perhaps they are all drunk.
To solve the problem of cheap and plentiful products and consumers willing to consume them, it is proposed to institute minimum prices – with the enthusiastic support of specialist retailers, from whom the “cheaper than water” claim comes – and to raise the minimum age for buying alcohol to 21 in Scotland. The evidence that this will do anything to mitigate the alleged problems is, of course, lacking.
Also in the absence of evidence, I have a prediction about the effect on crime of minimum prices and reduced availability for alcohol. Crime will go up. Not only will new criminal offences have been created, but since many will find it more difficult to get booze, some of them will steal it.
Reported in the Observer
Bob Marshall-Andrews yesterday defied the Prime Minister to sack him, adding that he hoped other Labour MPs would join the former shadow home secretary’s one-man crusade for civil liberties.
‘They can’t muzzle the whole of the party, and it seems to me foolish in the extreme in the present climate to start describing civil liberties as a stunt,’ he told The Observer. ‘I have had emails asking, “Why does it take a Tory to say this”?’
Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta.
But because the impetus behind this is essentially political – not security – the government will be tempted to use the Parliament Act to over-rule the Lords. It has no democratic mandate to do this since 42 days was not in its manifesto.
Its legal basis is uncertain to say the least. But purely for political reasons, this government’s going to do that. And because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away – technology, development and complexity and so on, we’ll next see 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.
But in truth, 42 days is just one – perhaps the most salient example – of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.
And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.
A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with 1000s of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.
We have witnessed an assault on jury trials – that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair.
And the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.
The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate – while those who incite violence get off scot-free.
This cannot go on, it must be stopped. And for that reason, I feel that today it’s incumbent on me to take a stand.
I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.
– David Davis MP
Quite unprecedented. An MP – and a privy counsellor – quitting in order to draw attention to loss of liberty (and he used my phrase, “the database state”. A meme whose time has come, I hope).
Update: now the official text rather than Sky’s slightly mangled transcript.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
